Things I Like..

Over the last couple of years I have slowly become an Adult Fan of
LEGO®, otherwise known as an AFOL! After building dozens of LEGO sets
with my children when they were young, I rediscovered my fondness for
carefully following directions in order to end up with the desired
result. This is in marked contrast to my day job, where I am routinely
called upon to create thousands of words of fresh content from scratch
with no structure or guidance whatsoever.

I have built all of the following large-scale sets in the last two years, along with four or five smaller ones:

In 2015, I hope to design and build a Great Ball Contraption of
my very own! In order to do this, I’ll need a healthy supply of
various parts. It turns out that there’s a really interesting and
well-organized international marketplace for new and used LEGO sets
and parts and that’s why I am writing this post. While I have no plans
to be a LEGO seller, I thought I would take the time to organize and
document what I found.

The Challenge
According to the Brickset Parts Database over
27,197 LEGO parts have been in production at some point over the last 26 years.
At any given time, a subset of these parts (in a subset of the 141 official
colors) are actually in production. Each new part represents an
investment of $50K to $80K in tooling and the company is careful to keep the number under
control. According to the book
Brick by Brick an
earlier failure to pay attention to the proliferation of parts nearly destroyed
the company just a decade or so ago. Today, according to a recent article
in Issue 21 of HispaBrick,
they design and produce 300 to 350 new parts per year and cease to produce
about the same number.

Most LEGO sets are available for a limited time. A particular part in a desired color
might be found in a handful of sets. This scarcity is what creates value and makes
the buying and selling of individual parts worthwhile for sellers.

I should note that BrickLinks is just one place to buy and sell LEGO parts online. You can
buy direct from LEGO Pick-A-Brick and you can also check out
the new Brick Owl marketplace.

Buying LEGO Parts
Let’s say that I need 20 of these parts for a project. I can simply search BrickLink to find a
seller who has them in inventory and make the purchase:

After I select a seller (based on price, reputation, location, terms of sale, and so forth) I make my
purchase (which can consist of one or more lots) and wait for the seller to send me a payment
request. I pay the seller, they ship the items to me, and I enter my feedback. The site maintains
feedback for buyers and for sellers. Here’s mine:

If I am buying a lot of parts and want to be sure that I am getting a good deal, I can
consult the BrickLink price guide:

Some Observations
After spending some time browsing through the parts catalog, seller inventory, and other information
on BrickLink, a couple things became apparent to me. First, there’s a lot of inventory and many
sellers:

Second, sellers can find many ways to differentiate themselves. They can decide to focus on shipments
to or from a particular geographic area. They can accept various forms of payment, and they can
specialize in different types of LEGO products (Duplo bricks, mini-figures, Technic parts, and
so forth). They can also set minimum lot and order sizes, and they can deal in sets, parts, or
both. There’s a market for just about everything including the original boxes, sheets of stickers,
and instructions. Sellers can offer new parts (taken directly from newly opened boxes), used
parts (often acquired in bulk), or both. They can buy popular sets and hold them until production
ceases, hoping that the value will rise over time (the Brick Picker Blog
analyzes sets and themes and attempts to pick suitable long-term investments).

Third, is that people are very clever and can turn almost any opportunity in to a full or part-time
business of some sort. Some of the largest stores on BrickLink have millions of parts in their
inventory; many others have 100,000 or more.

Fourth, there are a multitude of variables to consider. Buying sets and parting them
out is clearly labor-intensive. You’ll need to be well organized and have an eye for detail.
Buying and holding sets can be lucrative but risky. You may need to hold on to sets well
past their retirement dates in order to realize a good return. In order to do this you will
need a large amount of secure, low-cost storage space (the “value density” of a box of
bricks is fairly low, all things considered). International shipments can be profitable
but complex and (again) labor-intensive due to the paperwork involved.

Fifth, good accounting is key. With an inventory of tens or hundreds of thousands
of low-cost parts, you need to know which parts and sets are the most profitable, which items are
simply taking up space in your inventory, and so forth. You need to understand storage,
shipping, packaging, and handling costs. You need to track costs and revenue, track
and pay all appropriate taxes, and properly value and account for your time.

With all of these thoughts in mind, I spent some time exploring this space from the seller’s
point of view.

Selling LEGO Parts
Sellers must be able to find a unique selling proposition and then capitalize on it
in order to create a successful business. As I mentioned above, they have many options.

With a business model in mind, sellers need to acquire inventory. They
can acquired used inventory in bulk from eBay,
Craigslist, and local sources such as
garage sales. New inventory comes from big-box stores, toy stores, and
the link. Astute sellers are quick to jump on sales and take advantage
of LEGO VIP membership, coupons, special offers, discount codes, and credit card loyalty
programs.

Some good tools are available to help sellers make good acquisition and
pricing decisions. For example, the BrickLink Price Guide
allows you to enter the item number for a set and determine the value of
the parts inside. I happen to have the
Passenger Train in my pile of sets to be built. Let’s see what it is worth
as parts:

And the answer is (assuming that I can sell all of the parts):

I paid $129 (plus tax). It looks like I could part out this set and almost double
my money. That’s not too bad. There are, however, ways to increase my return. I could
hold on to the set for another year or two (the value appears to be increasing). I
can also do a better job of acquiring inventory. This set is about to go “EOL” (End of Life)
and was sold on close-out for just $103.98:

A savvy seller would pick up some sets at this time in order to maximize their return. Obviously,
there’s a very short time window between “End of Life” and “Sold Out” and you need to act fast.
Buying sets at this time should increase returns due to the lower purchase price and the
opportunity for a faster inventory turn.

Selling parts and sets is a service business and good customer service is a must! A successful
seller has to be able to pack and ship the goods on time and as promised, provide tracking
numbers, and respond to complaints and other inquiries on a timely basis. Reputation is
everything in this business.

Resources
This post is getting kind of long and I have just scratched the surface of this fascinating
topic. I’ll wrap up with some interesting resources so that you can continue to investigate.

First, a pair of helpful books. Both of these are relatively short, but are written
by experienced sellers and are jam-packed with good information:

Twelve years ago today I drove to Seattle and started working at Amazon.com. Today seems like a good time to tell
the story of how and why I joined the company and to retrace my career path to date.

I have been an Amazon customer since the fall of 1996. My first order was a book called
PC Roadkill:

The First Web Service

In early 2002 I was happily self-employed. I had a nice consulting
business and made a good living working with a wide variety of early
Internet and web services companies. Several of my customers were
preparing for a future where web services (discovered via UDDI and
accessed via SOAP) were commonplace. At that point in time, however,
working examples were few and far between. There were some simple demo
services that could return a stock quote or a weather forecast,
package tracking from UPS, and a limited bookkeeping service from
Intuit. It was easy to talk about the promise of web services but
there was very little to actually show. I must have drawn diagrams
like this several dozen times (this is taken from a presentation that
I delivered in late 2002):

All that changed in the spring of 2002 when the very first Amazon.com
Web Service (as it was called at the time) emerged in beta form. This
simple service offered SOAP and XML interfaces to the Amazon product
catalog and allowed developers to earn revenue through the Amazon
Associates program. I became aware
of this service, signed up for the beta, and downloaded the SDK. I
wrote some simple PHP applications to try it out, and then built and
briefly distributed a PHP library to simplify access to the data. I
was impressed and intrigued and sent them some feedback and offered to
meet with them to share my feedback in person.

At this time I was also running Syndic8, a directory of RSS and Atom
feeds. Syndic8 included a fairly comprehensive web services API built
on top of the XML-RPC
protocol.

The product manager responded quickly and was happy to meet with me and to
listen to my feedback. He also invited me to a modest developer conference that
they were planning to conduct later that spring.

Developer Conference

The conference was held on the 6th floor of the
Pac-Med
building. Once a Marine hospital, this imposing edifice dates back to
1933 and sits on a prominent piece of land on Seattle’s Beacon
Hill. It turned out that “modest” was an overstatement. There were
either four or five guests, including Allan Engelhardt , who is
still involved in what is now AWS. One of the other attendees was
under the age of 18, and came to the conference from Germany.

The attendees were outnumbered by the Amazon employees. We sat and
listened as the speakers talked about their plans to build on their
success and to expand their web service offering over time. One
speaker (it may have been Colin Bryar but I am not sure) looked to the
future and said that they would be looking around the company for
other services to expose in the future.

This was the proverbial light-bulb moment for me!
It was obvious that they were thinking about developers, platforms, and APIs and I wanted to be a part of it. I turned to
Sarah Spillman (who later married Colin Bryar) and
said “You need to interview me for a position here.” She was happy to hear this and told me that recruiting was one of the
goals of the conference.

Jeff Bezos made a cameo appearance. He spent a few minutes with each
of the guests and expressed his gratitude for our attendance. Later
that summer, Jeff’s prescient quote formed an important part of the
press release:

We’re putting out a welcome mat for developers — this is an
important beginning and new direction for us. Developers can now
incorporate Amazon.com content and features directly onto their own
websites. We can’t wait to see how they’re going to surprise us.

I left the conference and drove home, not realizing that I had just seen the future and that I would get to be a part of it!

Interview, Hiring, Coming On-Board

Later that week, the recruiting coordinator got in touch to initiate the hiring process. The first step was a phone screen. Given
my development background, I was quizzed on C, C++, and even had to write some SQL over the phone. I must have done fine and they
scheduled an in-person interview. I met with Colin, Sarah, Larry Hughes,
Carl Christofferson, and Rob Frederick.
Sarah actually asked me if I knew what Amazon.com did and if I had ever made a purchase! I expressed surprise that she would even
need to ask, and she told me that many candidates knew nothing about the company and had yet to shop online.

I was hired as a Senior Developer on the Amazon Associates team,
reporting to Larry Hughes and reported for work on August 19, 2002. At
that point the nascent web services effort was joined at the hip with
the Associates program, sharing management and marketing
leadership. My primary responsibility was a set of daily reports that
tracked the growth of the Associates program. However, Larry also gave
me the freedom to spend a little bit of my time (10% or so) helping out
the web services team as I saw fit.

The service was growing by leaps and bounds. I wrote some monitoring tools to make sure that it was healthy, built some sample
code, and also helped out on the developer forums where possible.

First Talk

A few months in, I was asked to speak at a conference. This was presented to me as “None of us want to do it and you are the new guy, so we
are dumping this on you.” Little did they know that I actually enjoyed speaking at conferences and that I was happy to accept their
offer. I am fairly certain that this was a Seybold conference and that it was held in San Francisco, but I cannot find the presentation
or any information about the conference.

The talk went well and they booked me for a couple of other conferences in early 2003. Again, I enjoyed spreading the word about
technology and was comfortable in front of an audience. I also distributed a very simple SDK on a small CD:

Becoming an Evangelist

In early 2003, Sarah and Larry met with me. They said “We have been
searching for a Web Services Evangelist for months, but it appears
that you are already doing the job. Would you like a new role?” The
job sounded intriguing but would require a lot of travel. I checked
with my wife and my children to make sure that this would be
acceptable, and it was. I accepted the position and the title change
(to “Web Services Evangelist”) became effective on March 24, 2003!

I brushed up my PowerPoint skills and decided that my goal was to
simply spread the word about AWS to developers all over the world,
raising awareness and encouraging them to build applications. Eleven
years later, that’s still my job description. My early travels took me
all over the US, to Japan, and to the UK (Hello, Slough!).

AWS Emerges

Jeff Bezos and the “S Team” (the Senior VPs reporting to him) saw the potential for infrastructure
services and put Andy Jassy in charge of the effort in 2003. Andy had
built several other Amazon businesses from scratch and was ready to do
it again. Andy shared early drafts of his “vision document” with me
and I provided him with lots of feedback. The label AWS, once used to
describe the service which provided access to the Amazon product
catalog, became an umbrella term for a set of infrastructure services.

Andy’s vision document outlined a broad collection of services and a long-term roadmap to build,
promote, scale, and charge for them. I discussed various aspects of developer relations and
product marketing with Andy and Drew Herdener
and we decided to create the AWS Blog in late 2004. At that point, blogs were
primarily used for personal self-expression and it was up to me to choose the best
content, voice, and style. As I said in the “Welcome” post:

We plan to provide you with useful information about AWS, products
built with AWS, web services development tools, interviews with
successful AWS developers,case studies, and information about the
web services industry.

I had no idea that this simple communication vehicle would become my primary work product a
decade (and over 2000 posts) later.

Lots of Opportunities

I am proud of what I have accomplished, but I know that there’s a lot more to do.
I have written over 2000 blog posts, one
AWS book,
and have earned six patents. I
have traveled the world and have appeared in front of tens of thousands of people, and
I drove across the United States for the AWS Road Trip
and was the host of almost one hundred AWS Report videos.

I have been promoted several times and am now Director of AWS
Evangelism. I have had opportunities to manage people, but I am not
very good at it and strongly prefer to be an individual
contributor (IC). Fortunately, there’s a place for senior ICs at Amazon
(me, James Hamilton, and
Werner Vogels, to name some public
examples) and there’s an IC ladder with another rung or two for me to
climb in the future!

Looking Ahead

Twelve years in, it is clear that joining Amazon was the right thing for me to do. It is hard
to imagine another place to work that would be more fun, more rewarding, or that would allow
me to have a greater impact on the world. As it says on that CD, “Work hard, have fun, make history!”

Making Root Beer At Home – “We will set up a fermentation in a closed system and capture the generated carbon dioxide to carbonate root beer. You may of course adjust the quantities of sugar and/or extract to taste”

Hugh Howey: My Advice to Aspiring Authors – “To begin with, you need to write. This seems axiomatic because it is. The only way to amass a pile of words into a book is to shovel some every single day. No days off. You have to form this habit; without it you are screwed.”

LEGO Engineering – “The aim of this site is to inspire and support teachers to go beyond the basics in bringing LEGO-based engineering to all students.”

Robot2: LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3: 12 Bonus Models – “The LEGO Group has just revealed the 12 official bonus models that you can build with the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 31313 set. They were designed by members of the LEGO MINDSTORMS Expert Panel, and they.re officially endorsed by LEGO. Some of them also appear on the EV3 packaging.”

Long-time readers of this blog know that I like to collect and share links that are of interest to
me. With the blog’s rebirth, I am resuming this practice. On some days I’ll just throw out random
links. On other days I am going to try for a theme. Today’s theme is LEGO.

Crowkillers: Jennifer Clark’s JCB JS220 Track Excavator
– “Now you can build the ultimate LEGO pneumatic model, the JCB JS220 tracked excavator designed by Jennifer Clark. This model has almost 1700 parts and features 13 pneumatic actuators and pumps, 5 motors, and all the functions you’d expect from a scale model of the real thing.”

RobotC – A C Programming Language for Robotics – “ROBOTC is the premiere robotics programming language for educational robotics and competitions. ROBOTC is a C-Based Programming Language with an Easy-to-Use Development Environment.”

Gizmo’s Freeware: Best Free Lego Building Software – “Fancy clicking some virtual bricks together on your PC? Over the years, the Lego toy brand has become increasingly oriented towards prebuilt models making it more difficult to think outside the predesigned blocks. But on a computer you can let your fantasy rip without having to shell out for designer components. And Lego building programs are a spatially intriguing experience for youngsters of all ages.”

The Great Ball Contraption – “Welcome to the Great Ball Contraption (GBC) website. Here you will find information regarding some of what it is and what some of us are currently working on. There are always several projects currently ongoing, and many of them are finished.”

LEGO GBC Module: Ball Factory ver.2 – “I added some improvements to the ball factory module, because the former module didn’t support 1.0 balls/s.This new module can carry at 1.3 balls/s.”

Over the years I have developed a set of productivity tips that seems to work well for me. I have shared
them with my coworkers from time time with positive results, so I figured that they would make for a good
post to get my blog back up and running. Once again, these work well for me. I am not religious about any
of these; if you were to shadow me around for a week or two you would undoubtedly find me breaking each
of them at one time or another. I have tried to illustrate each tip with an example or two of how I put
it to use in practice.

Here’s a quick summary of what I have to offer. The tips themselves are described in more detail
later in the post:

All Of Your Minutes Are The Same

Pay Bills as They Arrive

Find Joy in Being Productive

Enjoy Living Life

Keep a TODO List

Ensure that Done is Really Done

Put it On Your Calendar

Keep a Clean Desk

Learn and Use Shortcut Keys

Keep a Worklog and Good Notes

Re-Read The Fine Manual (RRTFM)

Don’t Lose Your Keys

Always Be Learning / Charging

Get Double Value From Your Efforts

Stay Balanced

Shape and Customize Your Environment

Be a Half Step Ahead

All Of Your Minutes Are The Same

I try to treat all of my minutes as the same precious entities that they are. I don’t believe that
I have “good” minutes when I am productive, and “bad” ones when I am not. In practice, this tip
means that I try to take care of little things are they come in to view, rather than setting them
aside where they might be forgotten.

Pay Bills as They Arrive

This tip is a direct consequence of the previous one. I still receive a fair number of paper bills
in my mail box. I fetch the mail, recycle as much as I can right away, unsubscribe from stuff
that I don’t want by using the Paper Karma app, put all magazines
into my reading pile, and then immediately schedule all bills for online payment. This tip
avoids late fees, piles of paper, and makes sure that I am on top of my financial situation.

Find Joy in Being Productive

It is possible to classify a lot of tedious stuff that must be done every day or week as
boring. I don’t. Instead, I find fulfilment in expeditiously managing all of the routine
stuff so that I have more time to be creative.

Enjoy Living Life

A lot of people seem to think that their life will change in some fundamental way if they
suddenly or eventually become “successful,” whatever that is supposed to mean. They envision
days filled with caviar, champagne, and private jets, not realizing that they still need
to handle the everyday realities of life. I believe that this attitude leads to long-term
dissatisfaction and to a life spent pursuing a fantasy lifestyle that does not actually
exist. I try to simply enjoy being alive and doing what I enjoy.

Keep a TODO List

Over the years I have tried and ultimately discarded many different systems and tools for
managing my TODO list. I used to track my tasks, calendar, and my days in a large
Day-Timer. I used Emacs Org Mode for a while.
Today, I keep a long-term TODO list as a draft-mode Outlook message. This list contains
items that I want to do over the course of the upcoming hours, days, and weeks. Every morning,
I examine the list, adding new items and reordering existing ones to reflect changing
priorities. I also keep a handwritten list for smaller items.

I do not obsess over my list, and I know that I will never get to the
end of it. I will confess that I have managed to train myself to feel
really good about checking off an item from the list. I’ll often put a
couple of simple (yet entirely necessary) items on the list in order
to have something worthwhile to do if I need a break from the bigger
items. I also like to break large items into smaller, bite-sized items
that I can push forward when I need some quick victories.

Ensure that Done is Really Done

Once again building on earlier items, I don’t check something off of the list until it is
well and truly done. I don’t consider my paper bills to be actually paid until I have
deposited them in the mail drop of our community mailbox and filed away the residual
paper.

Put it On Your Calendar

When someone asks me to do something, I need to allocate time for it in order to make sure
that it will actually get done. For work-related items, I estimate the amount of time
required to do the work, and then I reserve that time on my Outlook calendar, marking it
as Busy and Important. I also paste the original email and other necessary files into
the appoinment to create a nice, self-contained “object” that I can just open up when
the time comes to work on the item.

Keep a Clean Desk

I try to rid my desk of clutter and distractions. Besides my computer, my goal is to
have my TODO list, one pen, one glass of water, and my phone close at hand. I’m not
quite there yet, but that’s my goal.

Learn and Use Shortcut Keys

I strongly prefer the keyboard to the mouse, and sometimes tell myself that having
to use the mouse is a “bug.” I will even navigate through menus using the appropriate
keys on occasion. This tip, more than some of the others, is certainly a personal
preference, but it definitely works for me.

Keep a Worklog and Good Notes

For long-running projects, it is a good idea to keep a log of what you did, and how
you did it. This is great for development projects; you can track successes,
failures, obscure commands that took you 30 minutes to discover, and much more.

For my now-dead Syndic8 website, my worklog grew to over 34,000 lines over the
course of 11 years. Here’s an early entry:

Re-Read The Fine Manual (RRTFM)

When I first started working with computers, my time at the keyboard was often
limited to an hour or less per day. In order to satisfy my curiousity, I became
an inveterate manual-reader. I would explore interesting commands and functions
offline and then plan ahead so as to be able to make the most of my time at
the keyboard.

After I learned the language or system, I would always read the manual a
second, third, or even fourth time. This allowed me to make sense of more
complex features that I didn’t understand the first time or two. I have
noticed that many people spend all day in their chosen text editor without
bothering to learn how to take full advantage of it. Go back and read the
manual again!

Don’t Lose Your Keys

I hate to spend time looking for my car keys. In general, I try to make
certain kinds of things so routine that I don’t have to think twice about
how do to them.

When I arrive home my keys go into a designated container
on my desk (I realize that the existence of this container conflicts with
an earlier tip). When packing up after giving a conference talk, I
unplug my laptop’s power supply, and put it into my messenger bag
before doing anything else.

Always Be Learning / Charging

Be curious, and read something intersting every day. Never wonder about things,
dig it, search, and figure out what’s going on. Take some online courses,
learn a new human or programming language, or go back to school.

On a related note, be sure to keep all of your devices charged up. My
colleague Scott Barneson refers
to this as ABC – Always Be Charging.

Get Double Value From Your Efforts

I have found that it is often possible to do something once and get credit for it
twice! I’m not cheating, I am creating interesting synergies between my work,
personal, and school lives.

For example, I had always wanted to drive across
the United States, stopping in interesting cities and giving AWS
talks every night. As I was wrapping my time in the University of Washington’s
MCDM program, I realized that trip could form the basis for an independent
study project. The resulting web site and
final report simultaneously
satisified my work and school requirements. I also got a lot of first-hand experience
with S3 Website Hosting
and video processing.

If you are taking on a new work project, see if you can use it as an opportunity
to learn a new programming language or framework.

Stay Balanced

My day job (writing the AWS Blog is surprisingly
unstructured. Every day, I start out with a blank page and work to fill it with
words and pictures that describe our offerings. I have found that I need to
balance my unstructured job with other activities that are very structured. Lately,
I have enjoyed building advanced LEGO Technic sets containing thousands of
pieces. There’s something reassuring about being able to follow directions
that result in a defined product at the end.

Shape and Customize Your Environment

This tip can take on a variety of forms. For me, it means that I fine-tune
the settings on my tools and applications in order to make them work the way
that I want. My .emacs file dates back to the late 1980’s; the shortcut
keystrokes therein are now second nature to me.

Similar recommendations apply to your physical working environment. Fine-tune
your desk, car, office, and phone with affordances and tweaks to make them
work the way that you want. I suspect that 3D printing will make customization
of this time even more commonplace. The trick is to recognize friction points
and to see what you can do to work past or around them.

Be a Half Step Ahead

This may very well be my strangest tip; it is definitely the hardest one to
describe. The idea here is to anticipate the next step of something that
you do, and to do it as early as possible, preferably in conjunction with the
prior step. The best example that comes to mind is sitting in my garage! I
drive a manual transmission car. After I pull in to my garage and set the
parking brake, I shift in to reverse before killing the engine. This leaves
my car all set up and ready to go; I can start it up, let the oil circulate,
and then let out the clutch to be on my way.

I hope that you have enjoyed these tips, and that you are able to make
use of them (suitably adopted).

aws_S3_imagetag – “An octopress plugin to upload files to AWS S3 account and Provide a tag to reference the files in your views.“

Cruise From Seattle: Cruise Alaska… And Beyond – “Seattle is the homeport for cruise ships that voyage to Alaska and around the Pacific Northwest. Cruisers can experience wildlife and unspoiled water views while skimming the Pacific Ocean and inland waterways.“

Style Shapes – “Styleshapes.com is a creative fashion 3D Designers community. We feature most astonishing 3D Printed Fashion pieces and link to their authors stores where the actual items can be bought! We decided to create a home for all creative fashion designers starting with 3D printing to have a place to share their 3D designs and gain more exposure and appreciation that they need so much at the start!“

I had planned to resume my longstanding personal blogging regimen several months
ago. The summer and the fall were very busy due to the AWS re:Invent conference
and a large-scale kitchen renovation. both of these items are now in the past and
I am once again ready to blog on a regular and frequent basis!

This blog is now statically hosted on Amazon S3. The content
is written in Markdown and turned into HTML by Octopress.
The static blogging model obviates all of my scaling and security worries, and will let
me focus on writing new and interesting content. I still have to sand off a few rough
edges before the new hosting model is complete. I need to install a theme and I need to decide
how I want to handle comments.

With this new burst of excitement and energy, I will also be changing the focus (if there ever
was one) of this blog to reflect my current interests.

You’ll read a lot less about virtual worlds, news feeds, and syndication (I have nothing to
do with any of these topics at present), and some more about cloud computing (above and
beyond what I write in the AWS Blog, LEGO (especially Technic), and home-made pizza.

After graduating from the University of Washington’s MCDM program last year, I decided to
continue my education and applied to the Professional Master’s Program in Computer Science (PMP
for short), also at the UW. I was accepted and am starting my first class today.

NYC Resistor: Vector Display Introduction – “Vector displays are now mostly historical oddities — old arcade games like Asteroids or Tempest, or ancient FAA radar displays — which gives them a certain charm. Unlike modern raster displays, the electron beam in the CRT is not swept left to right and top to bottom for each row in the image. Instead the beam is steered to a point and traces the lines of the displayed image.“

National Park Service: Visiting the Hoh Rain Forest – “The Hoh Rain Forest is located in the stretch of the Pacific Northwest rainforest which once spanned the Pacific coast from southeastern Alaska to the central coast of California. The Hoh is one of the finest remaining examples of temperate rainforest in the United States and is one of the park’s most popular destinations.“

Tim O’Reilly: It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing – “n short, the secret of promotion in the age of social media isn’t to promote yourself. It’s to promote others. Success comes when your success depends on the success of your customers, your suppliers, your end-users, and when you spend more of your time thinking about them than about yourself. You can even promote your competitors. In the early 90s, we distributed to booksellers a bibliography of all the best books on Unix – our competitors’ as well as our own. Our theory was that if we helped booksellers to buy the best books, the sales of the entire category would grow.“

Engadget: Arduino Micro Shrinks Your Favorite DIY Platform Down to Ridiculous Proportions – “With the Arduino Leonardo, everyone’s favorite hackable microcontroller turned a new page. Now it’s time to bring that simplified design and slightly expanded feature set to the rest of the family, including the itty-bitty Arduino Micro. The tiny, embed-friendly board was designed with help from Adafruit Industries, one of the biggest players in the DIY market. “

Makeblock – “Makeblock is an aluminum extrusion based construct platform,provides integrated solution cover mechanical, electronic and software aspects. It can be used to bring your creations to life. With Makeblock you can make professional and stable robots, machines or even art-ware. It’s super easy-to-use. The only limit is what you can think of. “

Epic Tinker – “Our memories of our first electronics projects were fond ones. These experiences sparked imagination and creativity (and, well, sometimes it’s just sparks and magic blue smoke), but we learned from these experiences each time, and it helped develop the inventor and innovator in each of us. We learn by doing, trying, experimenting. It doesn’t matter if you are making a LED blink for the first time, or if you are a seasoned tinkerer, we hope you enjoy your projects and the wonderful memories they help create.“

A Lego a Day: New Lego train Coming in 2013 -10233 Horizon Express – “And it’s awesome looking! I have a fascination with trains that I can’t quite explain. I don’t have a desire to have a huge train layout, or even to motorize them, but I do love the Lego trains. I’ve bought several of them here and there. I think I really like the size and scale of them. And I feel they use the latest and greatest building techniques. You can learn a LOT about building from these Lego train sets.“